this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Isn't this true of like everything AI right now?
We're in the "grow a locked-in user base" part of their rollout. We'll hit the "make money" part in a year or two, and then the enshittification machine will kick into high gear.
That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.
If people dont like ai, why do all of my coworkers and family members constantly reference ai?
Seriously, yall mfs here on lemmy have the strangest social media bubbles.
Do any of them like it enough to pay for it? The figures say no.
I use it daily but I won't subscribe. It's like news. Why pay when you can get it for free. (I do subscribe to news outlets, though, but like ai subscriptions, I know I'm in the minority).
There is a specialised ai tool that is useful at my work. It's got a free tier which does most of the functions and the next tier up is crazy expensive on a per user basis for the amount of time it saves. If there was a reasonable subscription, perhaps I'd subscribe but I assume that a reasonable subscription doesn't cover costs, so they'd rather a free user to pump their numbers than lose a subscriber. That yells me it will enshottify over time or they hope that the cost will drop. The problem is that if the cost to host drops a lot, people will self host instead. It's a rock and a hard place, without a sustainable business model.
Lemmy us pretty much all is use right now. I don't know anyone espousing a. I.
It ain't a social media bubble.
Brother in christ you literally described a bubble.
Not really. It's easy to stay informed without social media.
Seriously you DON'T need it. Thatsjust conditioning. Take it from an old guy who's seen that play book.
Get em while theyre young and you'll defend em till the end.
Its the same technique sports teams and terrorists use
Wich us why older people were the target of smear campaigns regarding tech. We who grew up without it know that we don't need it.
Companies don't want that secret out.
Without social media, we wouldn't have real on the ground reporting, and we wouldn't have the most documented "live streamed" genocide.
This is what you missed by being in your old man bubble: https://tiktokgenocide.com/
Not that you care, you called me a bigot for saying America funds genocides.
Only one source of social media? That kinda sounds like the definition of a social media bubble...
I oughta know, I'm also in the Lemmy only bubble and am completely out of touch with most people.
Lol. Let me explain.
For over 20 years I worked as a developer and an SEO
I was layer off two years ago. Still out of work except for a contract here and there.
In that time I have reduced my social media consumption. I find my head us clearer, my days a bit brighter and problems either don't occur as often are more easily dealt with on a clear manner
I honestly have come to the conclusion that social media is now directly causing most problems we have, or at least exacerbates them.
So i intentionally limit myself to this, and I guess YouTube( though I only use it to post videos for the business I'm trying to get off the ground
Otherwise, life's easier without it
I watch actual news on tv newspapers, etc.
Yeah, I think quite a lot of people on Lemmy have similar social media habits (or lack of) to some degree. We also tend to associate with other people like us. Especially people in tech tend to talk to other tech people, or friends and family of tech people which is a limited demographic.
It's a very different perspective to most people. The average person on the train has vastly different media consumption and likely very different opinions.
There are a lot of people who consult LLMs in most aspects of their lives.
Yeah I've seen that trend.
Its very telling the amount of tech employees eschew social media compared to others.
Though I may be biased by my proximity to them in my past life. I wonder if a true study has been done?
The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you're losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.
AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.
I don't think they're gaining any market share, especially after the Chinese produced nearly identical services.
If anything, a smaller market share is better for business. The more users they have the faster they lose money.
Nobody asked
Are you sure that "people don't really like AI", or is it more "the people here in my self-selected online bubble don't really like AI?"
You're right we are in an anti ai bubble ( we all remember THE CLOUDDDDD buzzword companies wouldn't shut the hell up about, and that was an objectively far better service than Ai is) however, I can't name anyone in the company I work for thats had llms revolutionize their job. It helps summarize (badly) and help with excel formulas (does ok if you know what you're doing). Plus, our clients dont pay us to use a shitty half ass llm, they expect actual intelligent humans to do the work correctly.
I also won't buy from any company blatantly using llms in their products. They're good at hiding it. But I will notice.
I’m jealous, my director at a software company has a second laptop just for AI so he doesn’t have to deal with IT and is insistent on using it for every project. One of his annual goals is 100% of his division using AI at least once per day. For every person against AI, there is another who can’t get enough.
The stupid are easily addicted.
The 'cloud' was a pretty big thing though... everyone used to self host, now only some self host.
AWS, GCP, Azure make a lot of money
Have i done surveys, no. Have I seen the percent that subscribe, yes. I can only talk from my experience of my bubble. However, it bears up to the finances and the criticisms I've seen.
People like the idea and like that or can be a time saver for things like writing an email or resume etc. Managers like that it is purported to save money. The reality seems to be that it doesn't, or at least doesn't save much, based on studies.
I know people who love it and use it at work all the time for research with reference to internal info. I know people for whom it's banned and they need to document that ai was not used.
I know parents that use it when doing projects with their kids to save time but they worry that it circumvents the point of the project.
I don't know anyone that subscribes personally. From my perspective, most companies seem to be pushing very hard to get users. If their product was great, they wouldn't need to. There is no network effect like with recem fast spreading tech.
I should have phrases better. People don't like ai enough to pay for it and it's costly to run.
The companies that enshittify their service never actually care about their premium service. They provide a service which is good enough for free users and a pro version for power users. Later once they amass a critical userbase, they slowly make their free service shitty and ask users to pay to get their good-enough service back. Free users were their focus all along and these premium users are there just to pay some of their costs.
Yes, that works when providing the service is cheap to scale. Like social media, search etc
AI is not cheap to scale and is not as disruptive or groundbreaking.
Original predictions had AI taking over 50% of jobs by mid decade. We're here, and it obviously hasn't happened. Now, it WILL happen but not on the scale initially imagined, and probably in a much more insidious, gradual way.
Why do you think it will happen? Who were those "predictions" from? I'm guessing CEOs of "AI" companies AKA serial liars.
I took his comment to mean recession from bubble popping.
An attempt at that. It will be partially successful but with AI accelerators coming to more and more consumer hardware, the hurdles of self-hosting get lower and lower.
I have no clue how to set up an LLM server but installing https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-tools is easily done with a few mouse clicks. The Krita plugin handles all the background tasks.
Yeah, it’s basically like early days of cable, Uber, Instacart, streaming, etc. They have a lot of capital and are running at a loss to capture the market. Once companies have secured a customer base, they start jacking up the prices.
in this case there isnt customer base for AI, only ceo and c-suites are.
There is a lot of top down shit, but there is definitely bunch non c-suite enterprise customers out there. A lot of product managers are curious about this shit.
There are billions of free users available. All they need to do is strip-off few excellent features of their free model and hide it behind a pay wall annnnd voila these free users have now became their paying customers!